Posted on 09 March 2010

Yesterday, I had some tough time figuring why my Eclipse Debugger (for Java) was working
intermittently. Initially I thought it was due to the recent Eclipse updates I might have
installed, and hence, I reverted back to Ganymede from Galileo. It still didn’t work. The
next guess was workspace corruption so I deleted and rebuild the entire workspace, but to
no avail. After a lot of futile efforts and after wasting 3 hours on the same, here is
what I got.

Eclipse Debugger with Sun JDK 1.6.0_14 is broken. The problem occurs on Windows and Linux
platforms. This is an issue with the JVM and not the Eclipse Debugger. The workaround is
to use the -XX:+UseParallelGC VM option. For those interested in knowing more details
on the bug can refer to this Eclipse
Bug.

For me, I upgraded my system to Sun JDK 1.6.0_18 and am back running on Galileo.